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The Queue: Wish upon a star

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I think I started an epidemic. I put up a poll about StarCraft 2, and now we have endless StarCraft questions rolling in. I don't mind all that much though, because I've been spending more and more time watching SC2 replays. I've never been a big fan of WoW arenas as an e-sport, but StarCraft? That's a game worth watching.

Now I really need to start answering some WoW questions here before people start asking us for a StarCraft 2 Insider blog. Oh wait ...

calaf asked:
"Are there any plan to make a companion StarCraft 2 Insider website?"

As far as I know, there aren't any plans for that. It could happen, anything could happen, but if it does it probably won't have much to do with WoW.com beyond the fact that it would probably be another blog in the Joystiq network. Maybe if you ask Joystiqreally nicely they'll go for it, but that's a big maybe.

king_8_ball asked:"Do the WoW.com staff have plans to rewrite all leveling columns since there will be so many changes to classes, races, and the overall leveling process in Cataclysm?"

Though it might take us awhile to get through them all, yes, we plan to start redoing all of our leveling guides once Cataclysmis near launch. Ideally we would start on these once the beta is winding down and most of the expansion's launch details are solidified, but that's going to depend on the availability of beta keys. We usually end up with quite a few, but we currently have 15 class columnists. Over 30 people on staff total. Getting absolutely everybody into the beta isn't a realistic expectation, but we'll see what we can do. Who knows, maybe we can pull it off.

Jack Liu asked:"In ICC, how do the heroic toggles work? If you downed one boss on heroic, will you get n raid ID and thus get locked out of heroics? Are normal lock outs and heroic lock outs shared?"

You can flip it back and forth per boss as you please. You can do both normal and heroic bosses within one raid ID. For example, let's say you're going to run Icecrown in a 10-man raid.

You start the raid. Your raid knows the Marrowgar fight pretty darn well, so you flip the raid difficulty over to 10-man heroic. You fight hard-mode Marrowgar, you kill him, your raid gets locked to the instance.

You're not as confident with your raid's ability to down Lady Deathwhisper's hard mode. No problem, you just set the raid difficulty back to normal. No need to zone out, no need to wait a week for a reset. You just change the difficulty, get a little loading screen and then you're back in business.

With Deathwhisper down, you move on to the Gunship encounter. The Gunship encounter is hilariously easy, so you want to do it on hard mode to get better loot. You switch the difficulty back to heroic again, get a little loading screen, bam. Hard-mode Gunship.

You can switch it back and forth as much as you want, though I think there is a very short cooldown on the ability to switch. It's incredibly short -- a few minutes, tops. It's only there to prevent the raid leader from keeping people eternally locked in loading screens.

Blunaas asked:"Do you actually have a Magic 8 Ball for times such as this when there are no answerable questions being asked?"

Though I've used Magic 8-Ball images a couple of times in the past, I admittedly don't actually own one anymore. I used to have one as a kid, but the liquid inside of it started to leak or evaporate or something so it wasn't exactly functional. I had to throw it away. I've considered buying a new one so I can upload our Magic 8-Ball questions to YouTube and you can watch the answer being unveiled as it happens. Maybe that's what I'll do today, buy a new 8-Ball.

taufmonster asked:"Which Azeroth zones are you most excited to see what the changes are?"

A while ago I was asked which zone made me nervous when it came to potential changes, and my answer was the Plaguelands. The Plaguelands are as special to me as a zone in a video game can be, so the idea of it being completely changed is somewhat unsettling. That's why I have the same answer here. I'm both terrified and excited to see what happens to both the Western and Eastern Plaguelands. I don't think anything they do to those zones will live up to my absurd expectations, but there's still a lot of potential for character progression there.

Did we fix those farms in WPL? Is that land able to be used again? What about the Scarlet Crusade territories? Did the Forsaken move in there, or is Varian taking it to try and rebuild Lordaeron? What happened to Stratholme? Scholomance? Who's going to be at Light's Hope Chapel after all of this? Will it be the old, familiar Argent Dawn faces that have been around since day one, or will they all be evicted to stick an aging Tirion Fordring there instead? How far has the Scourge pulled out? Are we really just mopping up the leftovers, or are they still going strong despite the events of Wrath of the Lich King?

The amount of story progression they can do in the Plaguelands is astounding, so I'm curious to see if they'll follow up on even half of these things or if they'll just let it hang.Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!